This study addresses recent developments on the evaluation of multimode coupled bridge response and modeling of equivalent static wind loading on bridges when subjected to strong winds. First, the coupled bridge flutter is studied with an emphasis placed on the participation of structural modes in flutter, not only based on their amplitudes in flutter motion, but more importantly, by delving in...

Wintertime synoptic situations leading to the occurrence of strong surface winds over coastal waters of the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the northern Leeward Islands are discussed. Six-hourly average wind speeds for the oceanic areas adjacent to Puerto Rico are obtained from ship reports and related to the surface pressure gradient. The onset of surface winds of 20 k...

[1] Five years (1999–2003) of near-surface QuikSCAT ocean winds over the Gulf of California and northeast Pacific Ocean are used to characterize the changes in the low-level circulation associated with the North American Monsoon. Our analysis shows that the onset of the summer season is accompanied by a seasonal reversal of the flow along the Gulf of California, with the establishment of a time...

Sixty-four female college students attempted to study for a Tests and Measurements examination in a simulated dormitory. During the 30 minute study period, five environmental conditions were cxeated via pre-recorded audio cassettes: actual dormitory noise, rock and roll music, television audio, birds chirping, and silence. Subjects in the dorm noise condition were significantly more negative in...

We present a tutorial overview of the AudioBIFS system, part of the Binary Format for Scene Description in the MPEG-4 International Standard. AudioBIFS allows the flexible construction of sound scenes using streaming audio, interactive presentation, 3-D spatialization and environmental auralization, and dynamic download of custom signal-processing routines. MPEG-4 sound scenes are based on a mo...

Reliable measures of person positions are needed for computational perception of human activities taking place in a smart-room environment. In this work, we present the Person Tracking systems developed at UPC for audio, video and audio-video modalities in the context of the EU funded CHIL project research activities. The aim of the designed systems, and particularly of the new contributions pr...

Feature selection for audio retrieval is a non-trivial task. In this paper we aim at identifying an optimal feature combination for environmental sound recognition. The feature combination is constructed from a broad set of features. Additionally to state-of-the-art features, we evaluate the quality of audio features we previously introduced for another domain. We examine the properties of feat...

Tracking speakers in multiparty conversations constitutes a fundamental task for automatic meeting analysis. In this work, we present the Person Tracking systems developed at UPC for audio, video and audio-video modalities. The proposed systems are designed to deal robustly in both single and multiperson localization task independently on the environmental conditions. Novelties proposed are aim...

We present an overview of the Semantic Audio Feature Extraction (SAFE) Project, a novel data collection architecture for the extraction and retrieval of semantic descriptions of musical timbre, deployed within the digital audio workstation. By embedding the data capture system into the music production workflow, we are able to maximise the return of semantically annotated music production data,...

This paper describes a technique for unsupervised audio segmentation. Main objective of the work presented in this paper is to study the performance of audio segmentation system using metric-based method. The system first classifies the audio signal into speech and nonspeech signal using variance of zero crossing rate. The feature Line spectral pair is used for automatically detecting the speak...